Re: Volume handling proposal

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 13:13, George wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 05:03:45PM -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > Higher quality and/or newer removable media devices *should* have the
> > right kind of notification features.  Whether or not they are
> > standardized, or supported by Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever, is another
> > question.  Even if we were to put a dependency on kernel support for
> > this, there's still a quite likely possibility of older/crappy hardware
> > being used.
> 
> Also note that some not-so-crappy hardware may be affected.  Like the USB
> drives (like tha small keychain ones) or cameras or whatnot.  Anything
> hot-unplugable actually.  If the user unplugs the drive from the socket,
> it's again too late to flush buffers.

That's an entirely different problem - that's not the hardware
physically stopping the user from ejecting.  That's the user shooting
themselves in the foot while the device is in use.  (Assuming that
"smart" caching is disabled on mount for these devices and any write()'s
are as immediate as possible.)

Removing the device *will* notify the system, as will adding it, so the
GUI is fully capable of knowing when the device is there or its status
changes.

> 
> On the other hand if supermount is used, then to nautilus this looks really
> like things that we can have sort of mounted all the time ...

Supermount is a bit of hack.  I'm told its been rewritten, but still,
it's *not* a real solution - its a hack to get around the lack of a real
solution.

The proper way to do things would be to basically just make mounting not
lock drives, and have the kernel behave sensibly when media is removed,
including unmounting the device.   Supermount tried to do the
mount/umount things when the device was accessed, not when the media
actually changed states.  Or maybe the newer supermount does things
better, don't know, haven't looked at it.

All newer buses should work fine.  It's just the older legacy devices
like old CD drives, old floppy, maybe parallel devices, etc. - the ones
that don't have "hot swap" or "media change notification" built in.

> 
> George
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.